Noel Gallagher put a one-star review in a TV ad for his new album

Whether it was a cheeky move from the rock star troll or a complete accident, it's funny as hell

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If you’re going to advertise your artistic work in print or television, it doesn’t hurt to have a few quotes from respected sources to punch up your appeal. We’ve all seen this with film ads, but it happens with albums too. Typically, you’d want to use glowing reviews that praise an adventurous new sound or exalt the transcendent compositions. Or, if you’re Noel Gallagher, you might want to include a snippet of someone calling your new album “a dried up oasis of dross.”

That’s precisely what the former Oasis member did in a TV ad for his new album with his High Flying Birds, Who Built the Moon?. The commercial shows two favorable critical reactions before displaying that quote from the headline of a one-star review. It even includes an actual single star right next to the citation.

The review itself was written by Ian Maleney for The Irish Times, and it only gets harsher from there. Maleny says Gallagher’s “mind-numbing” lyrics are “repetitive, riddled with stock phrases, wrought in only the most familiar, leaden shapes,” and that the music is “a particularly guileless, tub-thumping, broad-strokes version of this pungent, hollowed-out [rock] genre.” At one point, he says the songs “would be a cause of embarrassment if you heard them played by a gang of black-clad teenagers at a Saturday afternoon battle of the bands in a rural parish hall.” Got ‘im.

Yet somehow, this scathing review made it into an advert for the record. If you ask me, this is a case of a troll trolling a troll, a cheeky move by the ever piss-talking Gallagher. Of course, it just as well could be an errant mistake by careless marketers. Either way, it’s deserving of a good chuckle, and you can see screencaps of the offending ad below.

The Irish Times called Noel Gallagher’s new album ‘a dried up oasis of dross’. Fair enough, but should it really have been included in the TV advert for the album? pic.twitter.com/QC0IcwMQGy

“Hey Noel, do you want to check the review quotes for your album that we’re putting on the tv advert?”“Meh, I’ll just check the first two, I’m sure the other one will be fine..” pic.twitter.com/UVVTT2HpnA